“White Liberty” — Awakening to White Freedom
Chapter Four of A Family History of Whiteness: American Roots of Racial Injustice
On any given Sunday in the 1760s, the cedar-shingled walls of the Baptist meeting house my Stites ancestors attended in Scotch Plains, New Jersey would have been busting at the seams with people. Inside those walls, despite the crowding, there was order, a place for everyone and everyone in their place.
The seating (and standing) arrangements in the meeting house mirrored the social order of the community. At the front, near the pulpit, were rented “pews” — not the long wooden high-backed seating I spent so many hours squirming in as a child, but box pews enclosed by low walls— occupied each Sunday by the wealthiest Baptist families. These box pews might contain, at the center, a throne-like chair for the patriarch, and, against the walls, benches for the women and children.
Somewhat less wealthy Baptists of Scotch Plains such as skilled tradesman or planters or merchants and their families rented box pews in the middle of the meeting house. On the next rung down the social ladder, those who could not afford to rent a pew, serving people or apprentices, were standing in the back of the church and, lowest of all, pressed into the back corners or just inside the doors, were the enslaved Black members of the church. All were welcome as long as they followed the rules and knew their place.
As Colonial American Baptists, my Stites ancestors were passionate proponents of liberty, or more precisely, of “liberty of conscience” — the idea that no person, regardless of status, should be coerced into religious belief. Enthusiasm for liberty of conscience among American Baptists can be traced back to Roger Williams. Writing a century earlier, Williams had compared forcing religion on another person to “spiritual rape.”[i]
Served by Black people in bondage and occupying lands stolen from Indigenous peoples, my eighteenth-century American ancestors had an appreciation of liberty deepened by bearing witness to the pain of others to whom they denied freedom. But it was never the goal of my Colonial American ancestors to make everyone free; it was not their goal to free women from subordination to men; it was not their goal to free indentured workers from their contracts; it was not their goal to free enslaved Blacks from treatment as chattel; and, it was not their goal to free Indigenous peoples from displacement and genocidal attacks.
In his 1975 book, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W. W. Norton, page 4), Edmund S. Morgan focused attention on what he called “the central paradox of American history”
…how a people could have developed the dedication to human liberty and dignity exhibited by the leaders of the American Revolution and at the same time have developed and maintained a system of labor that denied human liberty and dignity every hour of the day.
More recently, historians have explored the seeming paradox identified by Morgan and found answers. Tyler Stovall, in his 2021 book, White Freedom: The Racial History of an Idea (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, page 113) summarizes this research and argues:
…the paradox of American slaveholders fighting for liberty is not a paradox at all if one considers the racial dimensions of the American idea of freedom during the revolutionary period (and after). Denying freedom to Black slaves was not a contradiction, because freedom was reserved for whites.
Like Thomas Jefferson, my mid-eighteenth-century ancestors in America understood the distinction between divinely-ordained “natural law” in which every human was equal in the eyes of God — what Jefferson was referencing in the Declaration of Independence — and the laws of men which subjugated some humans to others.[ii] In the Kingdom of Heaven, every human who sought salvation might have a chance of freedom, but on earth, my ancestors believed liberty and justice should be reserved for White men with property.
Race has always been at the center of American history.
In 1717, my seven times great grandparents, William and Mary (Hall) Stites, sold the land William had inherited from his father Richard on Long Island and purchased seven hundred acres along the banks of the Rahway River to the west of Elizabethtown in East Jersey.
Religion played a role in my Stites ancestors’ decision to leave Long Island and resettle in East Jersey. By 1700, Westbury, the site of the Stites homestead on Long Island, had become a predominantly Quaker settlement and my Stites ancestors were not Quakers. There is no evidence that William and Mary Stites ever had any particularly strong religious affiliation — they baptized their children in a Presbyterian Church far from their home, across the Long Island Sound in Connecticut where Mary’s parents lived.
Within a few short years of the move to East Jersey — a destination for many Presbyterian families from Connecticut — William and Mary and three of their children were dead. They did not survive long enough to be swept up — as the next generation of the Stites family was— in the evangelical fervor of the religious revival movement historians call the Great Awakening.
Starting in the late 1730s and repeatedly until his death in Massachusetts in 1770, the English evangelist, George Whitefield, traveled to nearly every corner of the English colonies in America. Constantly on the move, Whitefield and many other evangelicals, delivered sermons to thousands nearly every day, carrying a message of salvation for any and all who opened their hearts to Jesus. The experience of “regeneration” (conversion or being “born again”) was possible for all, as Whitefield wrote in his journal:
…I saw regenerate souls among the Baptists, among the Presbyterians, among the Independents, and among the Church [of England] folks, — all children of God, and yet born again in a different way: and who can tell which is the most evangelical? [iii]
Although Whitefield and other evangelicals did not care what type of Protestant worship their listeners adopted, their focus on adult conversion was particularly conducive to the growth of the Baptist Church in America, a church that distinguished itself from others by its practice of adult baptism.
Even with his crossed-eyes and short stature (some say these traits added to his appeal) Whitefield was a rock star of his era, one of the most widely recognized and famous people in the English-speaking world. People who heard Whitefield’s passionate and high-volume orations were known to swoon, fall into a trance, speak in tongues, or display other forms of ecstatic religious rapture.[iv]
George Whitefield embodied the revivalism of the Great Awakening in all its glory and contradictions. He was inspired by the ideas of the Enlightenment and believed that reason and learning were paths leading inevitably to Christian faith as defined in the Protestant Reformation. But while Whitefield saw reason and learning as foundations of Christian faith, he also chastised well-educated Anglican and other Protestant ministers for lacking a passionate and personal attachment to the Holy Spirit.
Whitefield popularized the idea that dispassionate ministers were, in effect, “dead,” and needed to be “born again.” To be born again was the purpose of the mass revival meetings Whitefield and other evangelical ministers organized and led. At such meetings, Whitefield often preached about the importance of “liberty of conscience” and he, and other Great Awakening evangelists, actively encouraged the conversion of enslaved Black people and of Indigenous Americans to Christianity.
Whitefield believed enslaved Black people to be fully human and capable of being good Christians but he did not consider them the equal of White people. He considered slavery a fitting role for Black people and was an outspoken supporter of the institution of chattel slavery. After Georgia banned slavery in 1735, Whitefield’s energetic opposition to the ban was instrumental in bringing about the return of legal slavery to Georgia in 1751.
I have not been able to pinpoint the precise moment or cause of my Stites ancestors’ conversion to the Baptist faith, but all signs point to conversion in the heat of Great Awakening revivalism. By the 1740s, all (or nearly all) of my Stites ancestors and relatives in East Jersey and in West Jersey were Baptists. My great uncle, John Stites, Esq., the eldest son of William and Mary Stites, dedicated a good portion of his life and of his considerable wealth to promoting the growth of the Baptist faith in America.
On March 23, 1763, John’s daughter, Margaret Stites, was married to John Manning in the Scotch Plains Baptist Church meeting house. Looking back from my twenty-first century perch I am tempted to conclude the marriage was a love match. The two certainly had a lot in common. Both came from well-off Baptist families and both were extremely well-educated. However, there can very little doubt that the marriage was actually engineered by Margaret’s father, John Stites, Esq.
John Stites handpicked James Manning to be his son-in-law and Margaret’s husband for the same reason he had picked John Gano to marry his daughter Sarah. Both James Manning and John Gano were exactly the sort of promising young men he wanted to support financially and professionally. They were Baptist ministers. By marrying into the Stites family, Reverend Manning and Reverend Gano gained access to resources enabling them to travel extensively throughout the Southern Colonies to preach in revival meetings and attract converts to the Baptist Church.
Rev. John Gano went on to distinguished himself as a fiery orator and unrelenting proselytizer for the Baptist faith, not only in the Southern Colonies, but also as pastor of the First Baptist Church in New York City, and later, as a frontier preacher in Kentucky. In his biographical memoir, Gano notes that he developed a reputation during his missionary trips to the Carolinas of being “a good negro preacher” — the congregations he preached to were often comprised entirely of enslaved Black people.
Rev. James Manning also went on to a distinguished career as a minister and educator. When the Philadelphia Baptist Association decided it was time to create a Baptist college, Manning was selected to establish the college on friendly ground in Rhode Island. In 1764, he and Margaret moved to Rhode Island — taking at least one enslaved Black man with them — and set up the College of Rhode Island (later, Brown University), a college dedicated to the principle of liberty of conscience.
In 1769, John Stites, Esq. attended the first commencement of the College of Rhode Island and was awarded an honorary master of divinity degree in recognition of his help in financing the college. His son, Richard Stites, was one of seven young men in the first graduating class. As part of the ceremony, Richard delivered an address in Latin on the subject of the interdependence of learning and liberty — a theme George Whitefield would have fully embraced.
The rise of institutional Christianity in America during the Great Awakening (1730s to 1740s) helped fuel a passion for liberty, a passion that prepared the ground for revolution.[v] But it was a racialized conception of liberty; it was White freedom. Although large numbers of enslaved Black people and Indigenous people were converted to Christianity, the evangelism of the Great Awakening did more to increase race-based social hierarchy in America than it did to reduce it. During this period, slave ownership grew in America and chattel slavery was institutionalized.
In his 1990 book, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, page 129), Jon Butler writes about the impact of the Great Awakening on slavery in America:
Led by Anglicans and later powerfully reinforced by Presbyterian, Baptist, and Methodist leaders, clergymen articulated a plantation ethic of absolute slave obedience that ran thoroughly counter to contemporary English political and social theory, and became the principal foundation of American slavery’s distinctive paternalism, violence, and sentimentalism in late colonial and ante-bellum society.
My Stites ancestors remained ardent Baptists through the time of the American Revolution and for several generations after. Up until the time of the Civil War, the meaning of “liberty” in the context of church and state would continue to be a focus of intense interest and contention among Baptists and debates over slavery and abolition would create deep fissures between Baptist churches and within congregations. But in 1782, when John Stites, Esq. died and was laid to rest in the Stites family cemetery in Springfield Township, New Jersey, the exclusive association of (civil) liberty with Whiteness was firmly established.
The freedom American patriots fought and died for in the American War of Independence was White freedom.
On an unseasonably cold and rainy day in mid-April 2018, I visited the tiny cemetery where William (in 1727) and Mary (Hall) Stites (in 1728) were buried. What little is left of what was once a three-acre Stites family cemetery is now a roughly 2,000 square foot plot with twenty-two graves, on Mountain Avenue, just across the street from the Public Library, in downtown Springfield Township, Union County, New Jersey.
This small cemetery, now known as the Old Springfield Burial Ground, is all that remains of the seven-hundred-acre plantation that William and Mary Stites owned in East Jersey. I had travelled from California to visit Long Island and New Jersey in search of traces of Stites family ancestors and I had not packed a winter coat. I foolishly expected April on the East Coast to be as balmy as April in the Bay Area.
The headstones in the Old Springfield Burying Ground are mostly illegible, ground down by windblown dust and eaten away by lichen. But I could still make out the inscription on the six-foot long stone covering the grave of John Stites and his second wife, Margaret. It reads:
HERE lies interred the Body of JOHN STITES Esq who departed this Life April the 21st Anno Domini 1782 in the LXXVIth Year of his Age HE lived beloved & died lamented by CHURCH & STATE Also the body of Mrs. Margaret his Widow, who died Septr 16th AD 1784 in the 69th Year of her Age
While I was in the area, I also visited nearby Scotch Plains and the burial grounds of the Scotch Plains Baptist Church. There I found the gravestone, reconstructed in 2010, of Caesar, a man who had been born in West Africa and was taken as a child to be enslaved in America. Caesar had been a member of the Scotch Plains Baptist Church from its founding in 1747 to his death in 1806.
For decades, on Sundays, Caesar had stood at the back of the Scotch Plains Baptist meeting house while his “owner” and John Stites, Esq. sat in their rented box pews near the altar. Caesar was freed from slavery in 1769 after the man who had enslaved him died and he served as a teamster during the Revolutionary War. Caesar had liberty of conscience, but even the end of his enslavement and joining the fight for American Independence did not give him freedom; it did not give him the White freedom that John Stites, Esq. and my White American ancestors claimed as their birthright.
NOTES
[i] Calling for religious liberty and expressing other unorthodox opinions got Roger Williams thrown out of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Although Williams is now lauded for his advocacy of religious liberty, his ideas were considered too radical and were unpopular in eighteenth-century America outside of Rhode Island. See Edward J. Eberle, “Roger Williams and Liberty of Conscience,” Roger Williams University Law Review, Volume 10:2, Spring 2005, online at https://docs.rwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1327&context=rwu_LR
[ii] For an in-depth discussion of Jefferson’s belief in natural law and its implications for interpreting the meaning of the Declaration of Independence, see the 2022 book by Kermit Roosevelt III, The Nation that Never Was: Reconstructing America’s Story (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
[iii] An entry in Whitefield’s 1735–1740 journal marked “Boston,” dated Friday, September 19 (no year). See Thomas S. Kidd, The Great Awakening: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedfords /St. Martin, 2008, pp. 46–47). The following days’ entries are indicative of the frequency of Whitefield’s preaching and the size of the crowds he attracted: “Preached in the morning to about six thousand hearers, in the Rev. Dr. Sewall’s meeting house; and afterwards, on the common, to about eight thousand; and again, at night, to a thronged company at my lodgings.” In the entry for the following day, Sunday, September 21, Whitefield wrote that he again delivered three sermons, one in the afternoon to “a thronged auditorium, at the Rev. Mr. Foxcroft’s meeting house,” then “on the common, to about fifteen thousand,” then again, “at my lodgings, to a greater company than before.”
[iv] Many established church and civic leaders of the time were frightened by Whitefield’s popularity and some, perhaps half-jokingly, accused Whitefield of bewitching women with his irresistible sex appeal. There is a 1763 cartoon in the collection of the British Museum lampooning Whitefield and entitled “Dr. Squintum’s Exaltation or the Reformation.” The cartoon depicts Whitefield preaching in the open air atop a stool, with a devil below collecting coins and a devil above blowing hot air into Whitefield’s ear. Another cartoon lampooning Whitefield depicts him at a podium holding a bag of cash, with a crowd of mostly women at his feet, one saying, “Heal us for we are unclean,” another saying, “O what a Pious Creature he is,” and a third saying, “I wish his Spirit was in my Flesh.” Accessed on April 5, 2022 at https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/image/520008001
[v] There are differing opinions among historians about how central religion and the Great Awakening were to creating the conditions that led to the American Revolution. But there is no doubt that the preaching of the itinerant evangelicals in the 1730s and 1740s altered profoundly the tone and substance of political discourse. It is no accident, for example, that Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, reads like a sermon. For a discussion and links to additional resources, see Christine Leigh Heyrman, “Religion and the American Revolution,” (Divining America, TeacherServe©. National Humanities Center, n.d.). Accessed April 1, 2022 at http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/eighteen/ekeyinfo/erelrev.htm
